Games and Sustainability
Contemporary games are increasingly used not only to entertain, but also to persuade people, raising their awareness and changing or reinforcing their attitudes and behavior for the good of society. Researchers within this theme ask how sustainability games can address today’s environmental challenges; how they facilitate social change on a micro, meso and macro level; how they construct playful forms of civic engagement. Research also focuses on the environmental impact of game production, distribution and reception.
Ecogame Playtesting Series 2025/26
After a successful run last fall, Flora Roberts, Laura op de Beke, and Stefan Werning, representing the Network for Environmental Humanities (NEH) and the Utrecht Game Lab, are back with another series of ecogame play(testing) sessions.
Dutch Games Monitor 2024 is out now!
The new Dutch Games Monitor of 2024 has just been released by the Dutch Games Association. This monitor reports the facts, trends, and developments in the Dutch games industry over the past few years.
Shape2Gether: Experiencing the Bochum Summer School
This is a reflection of the third and final “summer” school of the Shape2Gether Erasmus+ project that took place a month ago in Bochum, Germany.
Hybrid Franchise Hacking Workshop (Gamelab x Man Met)
On April 30th 2025, the Utrecht Gamelab and the Manchester Game Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University collaborated on a first-of-its-kind hybrid three-hour co-design workshop, building on the work of Chloe Germaine and Paul Wake on ‘game hacking’ and the ‘franchise hacking’ technique developed by the Utrecht Game Lab on the basis of Germaine and Wake’s
Franchise Hacking Workshop (Gamelab x WUR Games Hub)
The workshop is part of the ongoing USO project Crisis to Resilience (2024-2027), which develops and evaluates techniques based on creative practices like game-making and community gardening/biophilia to foster resilience counter climate anxiety as well as other negative climate emotions. The workflow used in this workshop is built on top of free and accessible tools
Sea level game creates climate awareness among young people
Can a board game help young people better understand sea level rise? Over the past two years, Nieske Vergunst, a researcher at Utrecht University’s Freudenthal Institute, explored this question. She developed the Sea Level Game, tested it with various youth groups, and analyzed its impact. The findings? After playing the game, participants felt more aware
Shape2Gether – Time for Workshops
Games and historic maps in Utrecht In February the international Shape2gether team headed over to Utrecht for an interdisciplinary staff workshop. We welcomed our colleagues on Monday morning at the Media and Culture Studies department at the Kromme Nieuwe gracht, in the historic center of Utrecht. As always, the meeting started with cordial greetings and
Redesigning Monopoly to Foster Climate Resilience
On March 6th, 2025, as part of the annual Onderwijsfestival at Utrecht University, Flora Roberts, Larike Bronkhorst and Stefan Werning organized a workshop on how co-designing iconic (board) games like Monopoly can facilitate imagining sustainable futures and help mitigate negative and cultivate positive climate emotions.
In the media: “The game industry emits as much as the whole of The Netherlands”
In the newest issue of KIJK magazine, UU media researcher Joost Raessens was interviewed on his work in the area of games and sustainability.
Shape2Gether: Experiencing the Malta summer school
Hello again! We are five student from Utrecht University who for the past few months have been participating in the Erasmus+ Project Shape2Gether, an initiative to teach students how to communicate complex information relating to climate change using new media technologies. This piece is a retrospective of the second ‘summer school’ on the islands of Malta.